Science Design Discovery

The DJ Team

David H. Rogers is a Senior Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Team Lead for the Data Science at Scale Team. Previously, he led the Scalable Analysis and Visualization Team at Sandia National Laboratories. Prior to working at Sandia, he worked at DreamWorks Feature Animation in Glendale, CA writing production pipeline software, and his film credits included Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron. Before that, he was an architect. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico, and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Francesca Samsel is a Research Associate in the Center for Agile Technology at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and a B.F.A. from the California College of Art. Past positions include Assistant Research Faculty at the University of Texas at El Paso and five years teaching in the Art Department of Fordham University’s Marymount Campus. Her work involves identifying artistic principles and expertise with potential to assist scientists in extracting greater detail and clarity from their data. She also works in collaboration with computational teams, environmental scientists, using visualization, communicating climate science.

Dan Keefe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research centers on scientific data visualization, virtual reality, and 3D user interfaces. Keefe’s awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER award; the University of Minnesota Guillermo E. Borja Award for research and scholarly accomplishments; the University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professorship; and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, and industry sponsors.

Lyn Bartram is Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Art and Technology at SFU and Director of the Vancouver Institute of Visual Analytics, a multi-university organization engaging researchers, practitioners and organizations with challenges and opportunities in the emerging universe of big data. Her work explores the intersecting potential of interactive technologies, visual analytics and computational media from both theoretical and applied perspectives, most recently with a focus on personal visualization and sustainable living. She holds a BA in Political Science from UBC, an M.Math from University of Waterloo and a PhD in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University.
She is a member of IEEE, ACM and the Pacific Institute of Climate Solutions.

Benjamin Bach is a Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization at the University of Edinburgh. His research designs and investigates interactive information visualizations to help people explore, present, and understand data. He focuses on the visualization of dynamic networks (e.g., social networks, brain connectivity networks), as well as temporal data (e.g., changes in videos and Wikipedia articles, events on timelines), comics for storytelling with visualizations, as well as visualization and interaction in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Recently, he started collaborations with neuro and gene-scientists as well as historians.

Cecilia Aragon is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and a Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. She directs the Human-Centered Data Science Lab. Previously, she was a data scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for six years, after earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004. She earned her B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. Cecilia’s research focuses on human-centered data science, an emerging field at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and the statistical and computational techniques of data science.

Mariah Meyer is a USTAR assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Her research focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping researchers make sense of complex data. She obtained her bachelors degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, and earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. Prior to joining the faculty at Utah Miriah was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Ethan Kerzner is a PhD student at the University of Utah’s School of Computing and SCI Institute. His research focuses on design studies, creating visualization software for scientists, engineers, and physicians. Before moving to Utah, he worked on computer graphics applications for the US Army Research Lab and Intel’s Advanced Rendering Technology team. He holds an MS in computer science from the University of Iowa and a BS in mathematics and computer science from Drake University.

Nina McCurdy is a computer science PhD student at the University of Utah and a research assistant at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Her research involves designing and developing visualization systems to assist researchers in analyzing their complex data, while simultaneously tackling open visualization problems. Nina received her B.S. in applied physics from the University of California Santa Cruz. Prior to entering graduate school, she worked in astronomy visualization and public outreach for the University of California High Performance AstroComputing Center, where she helped develop visualizations of cosmological simulations for planetariums.